Intermediate Photography Course starts 21st October

We call it intermediate but it is the most advanced course we currently run but we always want to leave room for more….as they say. The next course starts 21st October

This course is designed for people who are interested in photography as a hobby or maybe a profession, it assumes that photography for you is not just a by product of an interest in say birds or flowers or walking in the countryside. We suggest that this course is for someone who is actually interested in photography, in other photographers and their pictures as well as making better pictures themselves.

“Intermediate Photography “The practical tasks you set us during the lesson and for homework greatly improved the way I took photos and the extended the range of subjects that I would normally take the photos of. Being able to see other people’s work and getting feedback from you and fellow photographers was a constructive way of developing my eye as a photographer. And finally, the course provided me with a reason and most importantly the confidence to approach an organisation and offer them my services as a photographer. Without that I don’t think I would’ve ever considered showing a total stranger some of my work and expect them to give me a job just based on that. So thank you Keith for a most inspirational course and my only complaint is that it was too short.”

We teach you how to become a better photographer by applying yourself to the process, by improving your sense of vision, by understanding how to see and evaluate so you pictures have more meaning, beauty and intent. We set assignments that will get you where you want to be and get you thinking about how and why you want to make pictures using a camera. We get students to work to themes or projects so that their assignment time is not aimless, this creates some wonderful images because they start concentrating on pictures they have thought about. Here is a short video of images from the last course

 

picture by Gunilla Treen                            http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7LWNyg5Pww

Intermediate Photography “Firstly, just wanted to say I thoroughly enjoyed the class. It was just what I needed, in terms of being able to interact with other like-minded people and being shown different approaches to photography. It was a really worthwhile experience and I think I my abilities have definitely improved. At the very least I’ve seen alot of work by some amazing photographers which I may not have otherwise have known about!” Jess

If you want to improve your photography, want to make pictures beyond just records, want your pictures to say more than “I was here and this is what I saw, perhaps, I was here here and this is what I felt” then come and join us, the next start is the 21st October, full details here

 

 

Trading Pixels: Shantanu Starick

by Jeffery Saddoris · @jefferysaddoris on Faded & Blurred

While many photographers are struggling with how to make a living from their craft, Shantanu Starick is just living. Since 2012, the Australian photographer has been bartering his services for food, shelter and transportation to his next destination in a project called Pixel Trade. When he began the project twenty-seven months ago, he set a goal of visiting seven continents without spending so much as a nickel of his own money. To date, he has made it to five of the seven and has completed 182 trades with restaurants, universities, fashion designers, ice cream shops, app developers, architects and music festivals. He’s even traded with companies like Squarespace and Vimeo as a  way to promote and perpetuate the project. For Starick, this is more than merely an experiment, it speaks to who he is. “Take a moment to realize how many times money enters your thoughts in a single day,” he says in an interview with Global Yodel. “Now imagine all that time opening for other thoughts or activities, like talking with someone or thinking of new ideas.”

You see images and read stories from all of Shantanu Starick’s trades on his website. All images © Shantanu Starick.

Sisters Forty Portraits in Forty Years

I first wrote about this as 25 years, but I haven’t been blogging for 15 years, and somehow now the story is 40 years, confused. However this is a fabulous longterm project that we could all undertake with our own families. In fact I don’t understand why more people don’t it is a wonderful record and fascinating in the changes the pictures show from faces with ageing,  posing and attitude, hairstyles, and clothes. It is a family record and a measure of our times. I found this most recent article in The New York Times I have just chosen the 10 year anniversaries, go and look at the intervening years here

1975, New Canaan, Conn.

The Brown sisters have been photographed every year since 1975. The latest image in the series is published here for the first time….

Nicholas Nixon was visiting his wife’s family when, “on a whim,” he said, he asked her and her three sisters if he could take their picture. It was summer 1975, and a black-and-white photograph of four young women — elbows casually attenuated, in summer shorts and pants, standing pale and luminous against a velvety background of trees and lawn — was the result. A year later, at the graduation of one of the sisters, while readying a shot of them, he suggested they line up in the same order. After he saw the image, he asked them if they might do it every year. “They seemed O.K. with it,” he said; thus began a project that has spanned almost his whole career. The series, which has been shown around the world over the past four decades, will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art, coinciding with the museum’s publication of the book “The Brown Sisters: Forty Years” in November.

Who are these sisters? We’re never told (though we know their names: from left, Heather, Mimi, Bebe and Laurie; Bebe, of the penetrating gaze, is Nixon’s wife). The human impulse is to look for clues, but soon we dispense with our anthropological scrutiny — Irish? Yankee, quite likely, with their decidedly glamour-neutral attitudes — and our curiosity becomes piqued instead by their undaunted stares. All four sisters almost always look directly at the camera, as if to make contact, even if their gazes are guarded or restrained. Text by SUSAN MINOT

1985, Allston, Mass.

1995, Marblehead, Mass.

2005, Cataumet, Mass.

this is the latest in the series 2014, Wellfleet, Mass.

Read the rest of the article and see all the pictures here

All photographs by Nicholas Nixon/Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York.